Project management is needed everywhere, in all businesses, no matter their nature. After all, project management is typically collaboration among team members across departments to ensure the successful completion of any project or product delivery. And to ensure effective and efficient project management, you’ll need project and collaboration tools such as Asana .
About Asana
Asana was built to help teams work together. It's a great tool for managing projects, tasks, and conversations among team members. The tool is broken down into three main parts: teams, projects, and tasks. Yet, these sections can be broken up into multiple parts, leading to some potential confusion.
One way to ease into using Asana is to follow along with the onboarding tasks created by the Asana team for new users. These tasks give a great overview of all the key features, and once you complete them, you'll have created your own workspace that you can use for personal projects or invite your team members to join.
Note: Our team at WebHostingSecretRevealed.net has been using Asana for over 2 years and we are very happy with it.
Asana Competitors & Alternatives
Although Asana is much-lauded, it does have its share of downsides. These weaknesses aren’t necessarily bad but may exclude them from some demographics. For example, it can be pretty complex for newbies, but that’s simply due to overwhelming capabilities.
So, if you’re shopping elsewhere for an Asana alternative, you've come to the right place. Here are nine strong contenders to Asana that you may find extremely useful.
1. Monday.com
Founded in 2012 by Roy Mann, Eran Kampf, and Eran Zinman, Monday.com was formerly known as daPulse. Monday.com has 127,000 customers, which is a pretty nifty figure. Its interface showcases a highly customizable visual table of rows and columns, which gives off a more modern take and is easy to use.
A Quick Monday.com Overview
Sheets are called “boards,” with rows representing tasks that need tracking to completion and columns holding related fields. You drag and drop what you need when working on the sheets, and they will synchronize with other associated fields. There are more than 200 templates that you can choose from and over 30 column types that you can customize to suit your project flow.
You can communicate directly within a task, so everything stays where it should. You can embed videos and other media within tasks and tag the relevant team members for anything at all. Notifications can be customized to suit your business needs, and there’s built-in automation that helps make life simpler for you.
More than 40 integrations are available to expand the functionalities across more departments. You can also utilize charts and graphs too. This feature is further enhanced by different colored llamas (yes, llamas) representing various status updates.
Monday.com employs enterprise security standards via its many certifications, such as ISO/IEC 27001:2013. It is also Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant, so you won’t have to worry about your data safety.
Monday.com as an Asana Alternative
Both Asana and Monday.com have free plans. However, Monday's free plan pales in comparison to Asana. While Asana’s free plan allows a maximum of 15 users and gives you several significant features, Monday’s allows up to two users only, and its features are somewhat limited.
That said, Monday.com is still seen by many to be a great all-rounder, and it holds itself strong against Asana in terms of features and functionalities for the paid plans. Perhaps the reason why this product is named Monday is to brighten up your Monday blues, the first day of work, by making your job much easier.
2. Trello
Trello was developed by Glitch in 2011 and later was bought over by Atlassian in 2017. Currently, they have more than a million teams using Trello worldwide. It’s not surprising since the platform is straightforward to use and offers a more fun way of managing your projects. It utilizes a web-based and list-making interface Kanban style.
A Quick Asana Overview
So, you start with a board with its respective columns and cards. You can expand this list as your project grows. The cards are where you input your tasks, then track and share them. Each card will contain all relevant details such as timeline, conversations, attachments, comments, reminders, and more.
The board is customizable and utilizes an easy way to visualize everything at one go. The interface uses a drag-and-drop approach. Butler, Trello’s built-in automation helper, helps automate your time-consuming tasks so that you can fully focus on what truly matters.
Trello calls their add-ons “power-ups,” and you can integrate with other products (Dropbox, Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, and others) to get your required functions.
Trello as an Asana Alternative
Trello's free plan is attractive with its unlimited cards, power-ups, and storage. However, they restrict you to a maximum of 10 boards per workspace, which can be sufficient for most of you. Although Trello has included Timeline View in its product lineup offerings (akin to the Gantt chart), it lacks complex project support.
Overall, it’s still suitable for various users, from non-tech-savvy to more advanced users. Also, unlike Asana, Trello makes managing the smaller projects more fun and much more manageable.
3. Teamly
Launched in 2015, Teamly is a comprehensive platform for all your project management and remote collaboration needs. The interface employs a user-friendly, task-based layout where you can plan your projects by assigning tasks and organizing them according to priorities.
A Quick Teamly Overview
Teamly offers real-time chat for easy communication, allowing you to insert tasks directly into the conversation for greater context and clarity. The platform also features employee time tracking, streamlining payroll, and budgeting processes for your organization.
One of the standout features of Teamly is its screen recording capability. It helps to clarify projects, problems, and assignments by capturing visual demonstrations or explanations. In addition, the platform provides workflow and task management that allows you to create unlimited customized workflows and grant access to an unlimited number of users.
As an all-in-one solution, Teamly combines its key features to create an efficient project management tool that bypasses steep learning curves and gets your team started in no time.
Teamly as an Asana Alternative
Teamly comes with a free plan that allows unlimited users, 200 workflow automation, and up to 5 minutes of video recording, which is fantastic. Starting fees at $5 per user per month, Teamly paid plans offer higher storage capacities, more rooms for projects, and the ability to control user access for different projects and departments.
4. Proofhub
Launched in 2011, Proofhub has been used by more than 85,000 businesses across the globe. It is a one-stop center for all your project management needs. The interface deploys a Kanban-style table-like view, where you plan your projects by assigning the respective tasks and filtering accordingly based on priorities.
A Quick Proofhub Overview
You’ll get a clear macro view of all the work stages through the Kanban boards. There’s also a Gantt chart where you can oversee the project’s timeline. Here, you adjust any dates based on urgent dependencies and unexpected changes. You can customize workflows and roles to fit your project’s requirements.
Proofhub has many built-in methods to tighten collaboration via its comments, one-on-one or group chats, @Mentions to bring another team member into the collaboration, announcements, and others. Perhaps, one of their most appealing features is its online proofing function; you can go through each detail, proof, annotate documents, and provide feedback directly on the spot.
Seeing that this is an all-in-one solution, you’ll also get time management features. Several timers help you keep tabs on the set datelines along with automatic reminders. There are also loads of reporting tools that help you get on track with everything about the project.
You can also create customized reports to get more insightful data analysis. Integration is possible with other popular products to help ensure your project’s seamless success. These include QuickBooks, Dropbox, FreshBooks, Google Drive, and others.
Proofhub as an Asana Alternative
Unfortunately, Proofhub's pricing plans do not include any free plans. Because of it, while it is a viable Asana alternative, it excludes a fair number of “explorer” users. However, they don’t base plans on the number of users – they have flat pricing for each of their plans, which can be very appealing.
5. Adobe Workfront
Scott Johnson founded Workfront in 2001 and was bought over by Adobe in 2020. Based in Utah, USA, Workfront is typically a web-based project management tool that encompasses all work management-related tasks, including project monitoring and tracking, managing issues, time tracking, and others.
A Quick Adobe Workfront Overview
Today, Workfront supports over 3,000 entities, including T-Mobile, Under Armour, and Sage. Designed to help with managing the whole project lifecycle, Workfront defines your tasks and sets goals and objectives so you can have a reference to base on whenever tracking the progress.
What makes Workfront interesting is its Scenario Planner, which helps chart various paths forward, giving you a bird’s eye view on different possible outcomes so that you can decide on the best way forward.
This method is how many can develop more effective strategies for their work. They also have code-free integration capabilities that can help include more functions to other systems, such as Jira, Slack, and more.
Adobe Workfront as an Asana Alternative
Workfront is suitable for mega and complicated projects, especially those that need a unified approach to teams. However, it may take some time getting used to using Workfront and, as such, may not be best suited for smaller businesses; it’s like using a hammer just to crush an ant.
Their pricing is not publicly available, so you’ll need to contact their sales team for the details.
6. HeySpace
HeySpace was launched in 2018 and is a younger sister of TimeCamp – time tracking software. It is an all-in-one tool for project management and collaboration dedicated to small and medium-sized teams that want to increase their productivity.
A Quick HeySpace Overview
HeySpace is divided into Spaces, which are basically projects, and then tasks lists and cards, which are tasks. This tool works on Kanban boards methodology, so you can easily drag and drop all tasks, track progress, and has a quick overview of projects. Every card has a built-in description, checklist, file storage, progress tracking, assignees, start and due dates, estimates and recurring options, tags, and card chat for internal communication.
Every space has five different views: chat, board, list, calendar, and the timeline for even better collaboration and planning. It allows quick task management and constant access to the most critical issues. HeySpace has two more views – MyTasks, which is for specific persons, and Overwatch view, offering a quick glimpse of many spaces.
HeySpace enables fast and valuable communication thanks to many ways of chatting. You can make one-on-one or group conversations, including video conferencing, chat in Spaces, in cards, mention someone directly or catch the entire team's attention.
You can also connect HeySpace with a few apps like TimeCamp, Gmail, Google Calendar, Integromat, Zapier, Trello, Google Drive, or Dropbox.
HeySpace as an Asana Alternative
HeySpace is easier to use and implement than Asana and offers cheaper pricing. HeySpace offers a Premium plan for $5 per user per month (or $45 per user per year) for an unlimited number of users. You can save up to $429 annually with five users if you choose HeySpace. Find out more about pricing here.
7. Basecamp
Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim founded Basecamp in 1999. It was initially known as 37signals and is now based in Illinois, USA. They’re a solid contender to Asana; as of 2021, they already have 3.5 million registered users.
A Quick Basecamp Overview
Basecamp is a project management application tool that helps teams function more effectively and efficiently as a team. Work is broken down into sub-entities and populated with needed information. These entities make up a project.
You need something on Project A, you just need to look for it, and everything about the said project is all there, ripe for the plucking. You are no more scrambling around, looking for things that you can’t find. You’ll have access to multiple tools to help get the job done efficiently.
The list of available tools is impressive and includes real-time chats, draft schedules, document filing, time schedules, message boards, reminders, and others.
You’d be glad to know that you have the flexibility to turn off alerts so you can focus on your current job at hand. And when you’re ready, you can turn them back on. You can also add more functions such as time-tracking by integrating with other time tracker tools.
Basecamp as an Asana Alternative
Basecamp pricing is straightforward and is at a flat rate of $99 a month. This price gives you everything, also unlimited projects and users. Although this may be somewhat attractive to some, it can be costly for smaller businesses with few users.
Unlike Asana, Basecamp has no free plan. They do offer a 30-days free trial with no credit card required, though.
8. Wrike
Based in California, USA, Wrike was established by Andrew Filev in 2006, after which Citrix Systems acquired Wrike in 2021. Wrike is a collaboration and project management tool that allows stronger teamwork via customizable dashboards, workflows, forms, etc.
A Quick Wrike Overview
It sports a no-nonsense interface design that showcases an all-around 360° visibility across all teams so that you can quickly find whatever information you need, allowing you to take action faster. The portfolio management for each project puts all planning and execution in one place.
Its Work Intelligence is AI-empowered and can help automate many tasks so that work becomes more efficient. It also has a feature where you can gauge project risk.
Tools such as Gantt charts and Kanban boards help give the team a more precise overview of everything in place. Wrike offers built-in templates that you can use to help get things moving faster. Their online proofing feature ensures all feedback and comments are organized where they should be. You can even trim approval levels to speed up the whole process.
There’s also time tracking and a comprehensive set of reporting tools that give you real-time insights into the project. Wrike emphasizes security via its Wrike Lock feature that offers encryption, single sign-on, and role-based control access. Over 400 integration possibilities are available, including GitHub, JIRA, Microsoft, Google, and Adobe Creative Cloud.
Wrike as an Asana Alternative
Wrike has a free plan, and unlike Asana, it allows unlimited users, which is fantastic. The allowed features for the free plan are pretty decent; however, if you need more, you have to explore the higher-tiered plans. Although Wrike is highly customizable, it can be pretty daunting for newbies, as the navigation process can be rather complicated.
9. Nutcache
Established in 2013, Nutcache was founded by Alain Nadeau and is now owned by Dynacom Technologies Group. It originally began as an invoicing solution. However, it has evolved into the project collaboration tool it is today. It supports entire project lifecycles.
A Quick Nutcache Overview
The project and collaborative boards are straightforward, giving you a macro overview of everything. Features and reports are comprehensive, which is great for more complicated projects.
Workload Management is their latest feature that helps you better manage your team members’ job loads by keeping track of their capacity and productivity. You can also customize workflows to prioritize tasks and ease assignation.
There’s the Gantt chart to help you break the tasks down into clearer pictures so that you always stay on top of things. As you know, Nutcache started as an invoicing solution, and it’s not surprising that it has powerful smart invoicing features, and also a billing expenses feature.
Nutcache also offers time tracking to help you stay on track, and if you need to charge your clients by the hour, Nutcache can help with this. There’s also a set of Nutcache APIs that you can use to connect to any existing systems you have.
Nutcache as an Asana Alternative
Where Asana excels in management, Nutcache seems to focus on overall business value. You can see this positioning clearly in its robust project budgeting function that helps keep your finances on track for each project.
You’d be glad to know that there’s a free plan available. However, the functions are limited, and you can use only up to a maximum of 20 users. That said, it is still quite a good deal to help you get started.
10. Smartsheet
Smartsheet is typically offered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) for project management. Launched in 2006 and like the name itself, Smartsheet provides an interface similar to spreadsheets. It creates a dynamic workspace so that your company can have an all-in-one enterprise platform where teams across departments can work together and are aligned to a common goal.
A Quick Smartsheet Overview
Smartsheet’s core capabilities cover all the essentials teams must have to strategize, plan, automate, and report on various tasks. You can work based on a grid view, per card, and also share calendar views so that everyone is in sync with one another.
If you need specific resources, Smartsheet’s resource management allows you to find what you need on the spot and also helps forecast provisioning for resources you may need across the board. Reports are shareable and easily accessible.
Some built-in templates and add-ons allow you to connect with other tools to enjoy more varied functions; integrate with your existing ecosystem via their Smartsheet Connectors. Like many others, Smartsheet also has automation for your workflows, reminders, alerts, and built-in messages.
Smartsheet as an Asana Alternative
Unlike Asana, Smartsheet, unfortunately, does not have a free plan. That said, similar to Asana; their plans are user-based. If you need the whole package with all the icing on the cake, you’ll have to contact their Sales personnel for more info on their Enterprise plan.
Since it sports a spreadsheet-like interface, it can have its share of limitations for more massive and complicated projects. However, if you’re an absolute spreadsheet fan, Smartsheet may just be up your alley.
Conclusion
Project management can be rather personal; its style differs from one individual. As such, it can be daunting and, at times, overwhelming to source for that perfect tool that meets all your needs. It is more of weighing your priorities over others to get the best fit.
However, consider your project team size, nature and size of the project, and your budget—all these help in looking for the best project management and collaboration tool. Perhaps, Asana is the best fit for you; maybe it isn’t. That said, go through the above list, and I’m sure you’ll come across one that fits your bill if you’re looking for an Asana alternative.
